This article identifies a series of opportunities that political scientists can seize to achieve the goal of this transformative push, diversify political science, and open it to historically underrepresented groups. Moving closer to this goal, I argue, will require an intentional and intersectional organizing approach.
The field of political science in the United States has been largely unable to diversify its faculty ranks during the past 20 years. Women, Latinx, Black, Afro-Caribbean, and African American political scientists in the United States remain vastly underrepresented in the membership of the American Political Science Association (APSA) vis-à-vis their proportion of the US population (Mealy 2018, 3–4). Despite the “small and glacial” magnitude and pace of gains, as aptly detailed in the 2011 APSA “Task Force Report on Political Science in the 21st Century,” political scientists from underrepresented groups are building momentum for a transformative push within the field. Drawing insights from their own findings about minority and women’s agency in legislatures (Sinclair-Chapman 2015) and social movement coalition building (Beckwith 2015), women, minority, and minority women political scientists, specifically, are enacting a pathway for diversifying political science. This article identifies a series of opportunities that political scientists can seize to achieve the goal of this transformative push, diversify political science, and open it to historically underrepresented groups. Moving closer to this goal, I argue, will require an intentional and intersectional organizing approach.